Sally Lehrman is Santa Clara University's Knight Ridder-San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair in Journalism and the Public Interest. Also an independent journalist, Lehrman specializes in covering identity, race relations and gender within the context of medicine and science. Her byline credits include Scientific American, Health, Salon.com, Nature, The Boston Globe and The DNA Files, a series of public radio documentaries on genetics distributed by National Public Radio.

Lehrman is deeply committed to the goal of a U.S. news media that represents the voices and perspectives of all of America. She is author of News in a New America, a fresh take on diversity in coverage and staffing, and served for a decade as national diversity chair for the Society of Professional Journalists. She is a USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism Senior Fellow on race and contributes to the Poynter Institute's Diversity at Work blog.

Before striking out on her own, Lehrman was a staff writer and editor for the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner. Her honors have included the 1995-96 John S. Knight Fellowship, 2002 Peabody award, Peabody/Robert Wood Johnson Award for excellence in health and medical programming, and Columbia/Du Pont Silver Baton (shared for The DNA Files).